It was indeed. It was also nerve-racking in many ways. We were trying to do GPU-based automatic video editing at a time when the Microsoft OSes were evolving ra

It was indeed. It was also nerve-racking in many ways. We were trying to do GPU-based automatic video editing at a time when the Microsoft OSes were evolving rapidly, so were the NVidia and other drivers, and OpenGL itself .. with varied support for "optional" features .. not to mention that machines+OSes weren't yet 64-bit by default. The testing team had a great setup to cover a lot of ground, but there'll usually be something stumping us. It was also a time when people were moving to slower and smaller machines - like mini notebooks - where they'd expect to run muvee on the Intel integrated graphics chip at full screen res. It was also a time when video was graduating to HD and codecs weren't fast enough and 320x240@15fps wouldn't satisfy people any more. We needed 720x480@30fps at least for the previews and taking the GPU route was a no brainer due to that. It was a case where we'd raised people's expectations so high (what'd take an editor perhaps a week to do happens in about 5 seconds with muvee) that unreasonable performance expectations became the norm :) You can, in seconds, try variations that would cause an editor to pull her hair. To top this all, the "constructor" which is the heart of the product had to be tested against many variations in media and styles. The details of that journey is probably worth another talk on its own. muvee released muSE as open source btw and you can find it here - https://github.com/srikumarks/muse https://github.com/srikumarks/muse . .. and it is (I believe) still usable in the "Reveal Encore" product. edit: ... and along the way, muvee also built the first mobile automatic video editor which shipped on the ROM of early Nokia camera phones such as the 6630 (https://mobile-review.com/review/nokia-6630-camera-en.shtml https://mobile-review.com/review/nokia-6630-camera-en.shtml .. scroll down to the "Movie Director" section)